Step 1: Choose a location in your home / party venue.

A lot of tutorials show you how to actually make a physical photo booth. But since this busy mama ain’t got no time for that, I decided to just use a location in our home that mimicked a photo booth set up.

Our basement mudroom is a long and narrow space, so we decided to set up the photo booth there. You can get a sense of it in the following photo. (Sorry about the fuzzy shot!)

You will also want to consider natural lighting when picking the right spot in your home / party venue.

Lighting was definitely the biggest disadvantage in our location (i.e., the basement). However, keeping the tween party confined to the basement far outweighed my need for perfect photos!

If you don’t have a long narrow space like this, you could easily just set up a backdrop (without covering the sides) on any wall in your home. Just make it wide enough that you don’t get any wall in the shot, or move your tripod in closer.

(Covering the side walls here just decreased the chances of getting empty walls in the pictures.)

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Step 2: The DIY Backdrop Material

I wanted do the backdrop as inexpensively as possible since it was just for a child’s birthday party.

I opted to make it from 3 large (9ft) plastic table cloths. They cost a grand total of $6. Gotta love it.

I doubled them over so that you couldn’t see through them, and attached them to the ceiling using painter’s tape to make it easy to take it down without ruining the paint.

They worked perfectly fine, however the plastic did cast a bit of glare in the photos, so if you have a bigger budget (say, for a wedding), I’d definitely recommend using fabric table cloths instead.

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Step 3: Photo Booth Decor

Depending on the theme of the party, you might also want to decorate the space a little. I hung a cardboard chandelier from the ceiling, and strung some lights (which also served as additional lighting). I also hung Broadway musical posters since the birthday party had a Broadway theme.

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Step 4: The Props

You’ll need a stash of photo booth props that party-goers can have fun with.

Since our daughter has been amassing a collection of costumes since she was little, it wasn’t hard to find a bunch of great stuff around the house.

But also purchased a few at the Dollar Store and Michaels, and I couldn’t resist making some mustaches-on-a-stick.

I organized everything on a little table so that you could find a prop you liked without too much searching.

If you don’t have a stash of costumes hanging around, no need to worry. There are literally a tonne of places to find printable, free diy photo booth props on the Internet.
All you have to do is search Google using “free diy photo booth props” or “free photo booth printable props”. Just to get you started, here are few cute ones…

Comments

Thanks so much for this tutorial! It was really helpful. I’m planning to make a photobooth for a charity op-shop ball, and I’m so glad I found an easy tutorial. All the other ones I found had me setting up an umbrella and a flash–WAY to complicated!

Because this photo booth was for my daughter’s birthday party, I didn’t set up ‘real-time’ printing; I simply printed them after the fact. But I’ve seen other tutorials out there on how to set up a printing station for events like weddings and things. Try googling it – I hope you find something that is helpful. ~Kerri

What are your thoughts on connecting a printer? I am thinking about using it for my guest book for my wedding/photobooth during the wedding and want them to be printed? I may just need to keep them on the computer and do something different for the guest book, but I would love your opinion!
Thanks!

I think I read about ways to achieve this while researching diy photo booths, but I decided to keep it simple as I was also running a birthday party at the same time. I’m sure if you google it, you might find a tutorial on how to do this seamlessly. However, the more technology you add, the greater the chances that something will ‘go wrong’, and I don’t think I’d want that worry on my wedding day. It might be better to keep in simple? Kerri

Yahoo! Thanks for this cheap and easy tutorial! I’m making a photo booth for my upcoming ugly sweater christmas party. I want it to be THE party of the year, this will definitely put me in the ranks!! The other tutorials I read were very complicated and had you making an actual, physical photo booth..what the heck would I do with it afterwards?! Store it in the garage and tick my husband off with yet another fun little tool taking up valuable car space?! Thanks a mil!

The longest you can set “Remote On” for Nikon is 15 minutes, once the time expires, you have to reset the camera to detect the remote again. The camera does that to save batteries, but it’s not the greatest feature if / when I need the booth to be ready to go for an entire evening where there might be long periods of inactivity.

I’m not exactly certain, but it wasn’t much (less than $75?), as long as you have the right camera equipment already. The only real costs were the Dollar Store table cloths and the props which you can find or make inexpensively.